European Journal of American Studies, 4-3 | 2009 “A Day Without Immigrants” 2

European journal of American studies 4-3 | 2009 Special Issue: Immigration “A Day Without Immigrants” Benita Heiskanen Electronic version URL: https://journals.openedition.org/ejas/7717 DOI: 10.4000/ejas.7717 ISSN: 1991-9336 Publisher European Association for American Studies Electronic reference Benita Heiskanen, ““A Day Without Immigrants””, European journal of American studies [Online], 4-3 | 2009, document 3, Online since 01 December 2009, connection on 08 July 2021. URL: http:// journals.openedition.org/ejas/7717 ; DOI: https://doi.org/10.4000/ejas.7717 This text was automatically generated on 8 July 2021. Creative Commons License “A Day Without Immigrants” 1 “A Day Without Immigrants” Benita Heiskanen 1. Introduction1 1 On 1 May 2006, over a million mostly Latino/a, but also Middle Eastern, Asian, and Eastern European immigrants took to the streets of major U.S. cities—such as New York, Chicago, Washington, D.C., Los Angeles, Miami, Phoenix, and Denver—to express disapproval of H.R. 4437, the Border Protection, Anti-Terrorism, and Illegal Immigration Control Act of 2005.2 The proposed bill, which passed the House of Representatives on 16 December 2005, included turning unlawful entrance into the United States a felony, punishable by imprisonment; militarizing the U.S.-Mexican border, complete with 700 miles of fencing erected along the border; and deporting undocumented and “terrorist” aliens.3 2 Because of its sweeping provisions, the proposal—dubbed as the “Sensenbrenner Bill” after its sponsor James Sensenbrenner (R-Wisconsin)—immediately created uproar across the United States.4 The conflation of immigrants, documented, undocumented, and citizens alike, with criminality and terrorism in the post-9/11 period, in particular, was a source of outrage among many immigrant communities. In the words of 22-year- old Mexican immigrant Ricardo Vargas, “When you are a citizen and you don’t agree with the system, you are a ‘liberal.’ When you are undocumented and you don’t agree, you are a ‘terrorist.’”5 In 2003, the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) created the National Fugitive Operation Program (NFOP) under the Department of Homeland Security to specifically “identify, locate, apprehend, process and remove fugitive aliens from the United States,” as a result of which especially Latino/a and Middle Eastern immigrants became targets of state-level search and seize operations across the nation.6 3 The “Day Without Immigrants” protest were part of a series of events staged in spring 2006 as a grassroots political response to the plight of the growing number of non- citizen immigrant workers in the United States. At the time of the protests, there were some 37 million legal immigrants in the United States, especially from Latin America, Asia, and the Caribbean; alongside them, some 10-12 million people—four per cent of the population—worked in the country without authorization.7 Yet while the protests European journal of American studies, 4-3 | 2009 “A Day Without Immigrants” 2 called attention to the grievances the immigrants were facing—and the problems of the existing immigration law—they also triggered some unintended consequences. Heated political responses in the media and public discourses became marked by an ideological pattern by which various ethnoracial groups were pitted against each other to invoke the age-old question of entitlement: that is, who has the right to be in the United States to begin with? 4 These debates assumed a distinctly racial character by which the class-based immigrant labor force was accused of siphoning off “mainstream” society’s resources, while posing additional threats to national security at a time when the United States was in the midst of fighting two wars against “terrorism.” This paper will consider the debate from the perspectives of scholars, pundits, policy makers, and participants. By giving voice to divergent viewpoints, it seeks to underscore the complexity of the power dynamics at stake in the entire immigration issue. 5 To probe into the different sides of the controversy, then, I will first discuss the notion of national identity—that is, “Americanness”—as a socio-historically constructed racial category. I will then turn to the May Day rallies and the counter-reactions prompted by the protests across the U.S. political spectrum, as voiced by grassroots activists and various interest groups in the so-called “ethnic” and “mainstream” media alike. Since Latino/as constitute the largest numbers of both authorized and unauthorized immigrants currently residing in the United States, they will be the main focus of my discussion.8 Despite this dominance, I want to emphasize that the immigrant rights movement itself is much more heterogeneous than my discussion allows for; indeed, it is a collaborative effort by a range of different ethnoracial groups as well as a whole host of religious, political, labor, and grassroots civil rights organizations together. 6 Thirdly, I will address some of the larger implications of the current controversy in the light of occurrences of nativism in U.S. history. Through these diverse perspectives, I will argue that the immigration debates prompted by the “Day Without Immigrants” protests did not, ultimately, seek to offer solutions to the proposed legislation but rather commented on the ramifications of an increasingly multiracial nationhood, that is, the delineation of “Americanness” beyond a black-and-white paradigm. Yet, I want to suggest, such debates in the future might better be conceptualized not from the perspective of the United States alone, but as part and parcel of broader hemispheric socioeconomic power relations within the Americas. 2. “Americanness” as Racial Ideology 7 As historians and scholars on racial relations have in recent years frequently pointed out, ever since the United States was founded, race has been a central concern in defining citizenship, national identity, and nationhood. After the Naturalization Law of 1790 first granted U.S. citizenship to free “white” persons alone, the position of newcomers to the country was assessed for over two and a half centuries against the socio-historical and legal construction of “whiteness.”9 Because immigration law was tied to racial categorization, it determined both who was able to legally enter the country and who had the right to claim belonging in the U.S. nation-state at any one time. 8 Race, in effect, became a policy matter, albeit a contentious one due to the discrepancies between the nation’s legal scripture and everyday practices. While the 14th amendment, for example, granted citizenship to African Americans in 1868, the egalitarian principle was undermined by Plessy v. Ferguson’s “separate but equal” European journal of American studies, 4-3 | 2009 “A Day Without Immigrants” 3 doctrine that established de jure segregation in 1896. Moreover, as evidenced in the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798, the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 (and its corollary, the so-called “Asiatic Barred Zone” in 1917), the Quota Law of 1921, the Johnson-Reed Immigration Act of 1924, the Mexican repatriation campaigns in the 1930s, Operation Wetback of 1954, and a series of other legislative efforts from the past half century, certain immigrant groups have been deemed less “desirable” than others at particular historical moments, also contingent upon the geopolitical situation of the world.10 Indeed, Lina Newton aptly makes the case that such “policy designs rest on a national mythology about what types of immigrants made America, and which ones lack the values, traits, or contributions that would earn them inclusion in that story.”11 9 Even if the racial premise of naturalization was overturned with the McCarran-Walter Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952, the socio-cultural question of who is entitled to claim “Americanness” continues to have widespread ramifications up until today. Because non-white immigrant experiences have historically been compared against the backdrop of the early European immigration waves of the 19th and early 20th centuries, “the idea of being an ‘American,’” to quote Richard Dyer, “has long sat uneasily with ideas of being any other colour [sic] than white.”12 10 The ambiguous position of Latino/as, the fastest growing U.S. minority, between the racial hierarchy of whiteness and blackness is the product of a complex historical relationship between the United States and Latin American nations. For example, while the Treaty of the Guadalupe Hidalgo of 1848, which ended the war between the United States and Mexico, granted de jure “whiteness” to Mexicans in the Southwest, it failed to bring about de facto citizenship rights to most of them. After the annexation, lower- class Mexicans became a racialized labor force serving as domestics and farm workers in the Southwest, frequently facing dual wage structures, segregation, and racism. Up until today, Mexicans from both sides of the border have comprised the largest number of migrant workers—especially in the agribusiness sector—and both the U.S. and Mexican governments have promoted such movement of labor through various bilateral initiatives. 11 During World War II, the so-called Bracero Program allowed 4.6 million Mexicans to come to the United States as farm workers. By the 1950s, however, there was a surplus of Mexican laborers, and the U.S. Border Patrol started implementing the Operation Wetback campaign to deport these migrant workers (some of whom were U.S. citizens) back to Mexico.13 Thus a dual

Load more